


and we'll burn

by loyaulte_me_lie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Blindess, Everything goes majorly south, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-29
Packaged: 2018-09-14 11:55:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9180457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loyaulte_me_lie/pseuds/loyaulte_me_lie
Summary: '“We all have ghosts,” he says softly. “You don’t think I’m the exact same as you, sitting here, wondering if the people I love are even alive out there?”' or// the one in which an off-the-books assassination attempt goes tits up and Poe is left for dead in a backstreet on Generis.





	1. I Am A Cardinal Red

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [There Will Be Light](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/252727) by unicornesque. 



> Also posted on SpaceBattles (because my brother never gives up). Work title courtesy of Muse, chapter title courtesy of The Staves. Inspired by one of my favourite authors over in the Les Mis fandom on ff.net who has been my writing crush for many years and by YV-4209 by Lumelle. Enjoy xx

**How did you survive the war?**

**Once upon a time in a system on the outer reaches of the galaxy...**

**[pause]**

**That’s how fairytales start, isn’t it?**

*

It always comes down to this:

They’re barricaded into a room with a sloping ceiling crashing down over their heads, an orchestra of blaster-fire and screams in the streets outside. Poe doesn’t think he remembers a time when there wasn’t any screaming. After all these years, it’s the only thing he hears anymore, spilling hot and quick out of the crevasses of his nightmares and lodging in his ears, refusing to move. He grips his blaster at the sound of footsteps on the stairs, looking to the ash-streaked faces of Finn and Rey, their ragged breathing puncturing the sudden silence.

This is it. This is how it all ends.

*

**How did you survive the war?**

**Blind hope is a glorious thing, you know.**

                                                                                                                     *                                                                                                                     

The girls are the ones who find the dead man in our backyard. He’s wearing a cracked green jacket, and his skin is stained bone-deep with blood. Anja, the littlest, comes padding into the kitchen on moon-soft feet, and tugs at my hand, dislodging clouds of soap bubbles that drift to the tiles. It briefly crosses my mind that small girls aren’t supposed to treat dead bodies with such quietness, that if I’d found a corpse in my backyard when I was Anja’s age I would have screamed bloody murder, but then again, when I was Anja’s age, we weren’t at war.

I brush the washing-up water onto my apron and follow my daughter out of the leaning stoop of the doorway and into the knee-high grass that parts with a whisper. Queenie twists at our approach, her blue eyes enormous in the pale frame of her face.

“Momma,” she says. “I don’t think he’s dead.”

“Let me see,” I say, crouching beside her next to the body. His eyes are shut; there’s crimson clotted in his hairline and tracing down his face, thundercloud-bruises clustering menacingly around his neck. I reach to find a pulse-point, trying to remember the rhythms and patterns of a long-ago life.

There’s a weak fluttering under my fingers, and I bite back the warm groan filling my throat. Why did he have to be alive? Why couldn’t he just have been cold, a silent heart and stagnating lungs that we could have buried alongside the others in the bottom of the garden and safely forgotten about?

“Momma, is he ‘live?” Anja asks through her thumb.

“Yes,” I say, taking my fingers away from his purple-blue neck and sighing. Inevitability, I think, is a little bugger.

“Momma, can we keep him?” Queenie reaches out to grip my hand with her thin little fingers, the sunlight filtering through her pale hair like a corona.

“He’s not a puppy,” I tell her sternly.

“But he’s hurt and I can look after him and…” her eyes are mute and pleading and exactly like they were when we found Anja in a basket of dirty linen on the street four long years ago. I’m torn between making her want to toughen up, shaking her and saying _Queenie there’s a war on, people die, you_ can’t _save everyone, understand_ and cherishing the sweet, kind twelve year old that squalling, red-faced scrap I gave birth to has grown up to be. Kindness is in short supply these days, and from the looks of him, our mystery man is on his last legs. It probably won’t be too much of an imposition.

“Help me find something to drag him into the house,” I say roughly. Her face lights up and she scrambles up, grabbing Anja’s hand.

“Come on come on come on!”

I dampen my fingers and reach out to brush his black curls out his face. “You’re lucky my daughter has a soft spot the size of the galaxy,” I tell our unexpected house guest. He doesn’t respond, of course.

I suppose that was how it began.

*

“Is he going to be alright?” Queenie asks that night as I tuck her and Anja under the blankets with the ratty stuffed nerf and kisses on foreheads.

“I don’t know,” I say. He hasn’t woken up, but if anything his pulse has gotten stronger since I smeared one of our last packets of bacta gel onto the wounds. There’s a kriffing lot of them; his body is a patchwork of weeping cuts and bruises and furious burns and it makes even my stomach turn to think about what he must have endured before passing out. It’s not like violence is a rare occurrence out here.

“I’ll make a wish for him,” she tells me solemnly and I brush her fringe aside to give her another kiss.

“You do that, sweetie. See you in the morning.”

“Night, Momma.” Queenie lies down, tucking herself around her sister for warmth. Anja mumbles and pushes her head into the join between Queenie’s shoulder and chin, and I clamp down on the smile threatening at my lips, turning to blow out the candle.

*

_It isn’t really a surprise when he gets back from another reconnaissance mission to find Rey and Finn sitting on his bed with mugs of coffee, knees pressed together and slippery silence sliding between their shoulders._

_“What’s happened?”_

_“We’ve found Kylo Ren,” Finn answers._

_“Well, I know where he is,” Rey corrects. Her hands are trembling, and Poe reaches out to take one of them. She exhales. “Don’t ask me how but I just know.”_

_It’s easy to pass off as one of the odd Force-things that Rey does nowadays. Even though she’s still an apprentice she can control people and things, pulling skeins of thoughts from their heads and freezing their limbs mid-movement. Having been on the wrong end of someone who uses the Force, Poe thinks he should be terrified of her except its Rey who is stubbornly, sometimes infuriatingly, good. It’s incandescent under her skin; she glows with it, and that’s the only reason his feet stay where they are when she’s manipulating the field-lines only she can see._

_“Have you told the General?”_

_“All we need is transport,” Rey says, a set to her jaw that in no way does Poe like._

_“You have to tell her – she’s in charge, she knows what she’s doing and he may be banthafucking crazy but he’s her son – surely she gets a say in this…” Rey and Finn exchange a look and he has to bite back the irritation searing his throat. “She said no, didn’t she?”_

_“She said it was a political risk she wasn’t willing to take because of Imperial fragments and things,” Finn says. “He’s on Generis, by the way, Force knows why…”_

_“Maybe even evil psychopaths like wilderness holidays.”_

_“This isn’t funny, Poe.”_

_“This is a hell of risk you’re proposing, going after him alone.”_

_Finn shifts, and there’s lightening in his eyes, feral and sparking and terrifying, and even though what they’re suggesting is madness, Poe thinks he’s never been more in love with someone in his life. “Are you in?”_

_“Isn’t it a good thing crazy-risk taker is basically a pilot’s job description?”_

*

**How did you survive the war?**

**Every cloud has a silver lining.**

*

To my equal annoyance and relief, Mr Mystery lives. No, that’s wrong I wouldn’t call it living; all he does is lie there and breathe wheezily through his bruised throat with his eyes shut, a flush roaring in his cheekbones and fever dancing through his veins. There are moments when I’m sure he’s going to give up the ghost and slip into death’s waiting arms, but he just refuses to goddamn die – either he’s made of stubborn or that something in his unconscious mind hears Queenie when she sits with him far past her bedtime, brushing wet cloths across his forehead and murmuring in the sing-song way of girls who are yet to grow up and discover the cruelty of the world.

It’s the fifth day when he wakes up.

I’m downstairs, telling stories to a sleepy Anja when I hear Queenie’s high, thin shriek. I unceremoniously dump Anja off my lap and run upstairs, fear giving me wings – _what if he’s hurt her, what if I’ve taken a madman into my house, I’ll never forgive myself if anything happens to her_ – to find her standing in the doorway, clasping her hands together and vibrating on the spot.

“Momma, he’s waking up!”

Oh _wonderful._ “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I say. “Go and sit with Anja.”

“But Momma…”

“Queenie.”

“Yes Momma,” she says, her shoulders hunching in. She walks past me, glancing over her shoulder as she goes. I make a shooing motion and watch as her blonde head creeps slowly down the rickety steps, waiting until she’s completely out of sight before setting my shoulders and crossing the threshold.

*

_“Jess – Finn, Rey and I are heading off on a mission this afternoon, so you’re in charge for the next two days, okay?” Poe drapes himself against her doorway, aiming for casual and hoping she can’t see the tension coiling in his muscles._

_“Mission? What mission – why aren’t we coming?”_

_He raises an eyebrow. “It’s a covert one.”_

_“Me and Snap can do covert,” she argues, spinning around on her chair._

_“Jess,” Poe bites back a laugh. “Remember that time you tried to steal more dessert out of the mess hall?”_

_Jess contorts her face into something that promises certain doom. “We got the desired outcome, asshole.”_

_“By setting half the mess-hall on fire and recruiting two hundred of the ground monkeys, sure. Very stealthy.”_

_“Like you’re any better.”_

_“Don’t be bitter because I get more exciting missions than you.” He reaches out to ruffle her hair, and she growls, ducking out from under his hand._

_“If you die, I’ll be really cross.”_

_“I won’t die.”_

_“I’m holding you to that.”_

_*_

His eyes are open and staring right at the ceiling. He tries to push himself upwards at the sound of my footsteps but he’s still as weak as new-born thing, and collapses back down against the pillows, his wheezing breaths a sandstorm in his chest.

“Don’t try and move,” I say, and he looks around wildly at the sound of my voice. Something settles, heavy and thick in my stomach as I watch him. Dread, I think. I step closer to the bed. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I tell him in my best nurse-voice, compassion and authority and years of telling dead men they’re going to live all rolled into one. Almost of its own volition, I move my hand towards his face, his open, staring eyes.

Here is the thing that I knew was going to happen: he doesn’t react.

He’s blind.

*

**How did you survive the war?**

**That’s the thing: I don’t think I did.**

*

“Who are you? Where am I? Why can’t I see?” he gets out eventually, after I’ve helped him sit up a little against the headboard and drink half a mug of water.

“My name’s Branwen, I’m a nurse. You’re not in any danger.” I wonder, if when they find my bones years from now, that set of phrases will be ingrained on them? I’ve said them so many times that they’re branded into me, like a softer, gentler version of the name, rank, serial number of ancient armies. “You’re on Generis…”

“I _know_ ,” he says, frustrated, glaring at a point a little over my left shoulder. “Why can’t I _see_?”

So he wasn’t blind before. I rifle through my memory for the best way to break the news to him; it was usually doctors that had that _wonderful_ task, but sometimes, especially towards the end, when doctors were in short supply, it fell to the nurses. I take a deep breath, letting the air loosen the iron bands constricting my chest.

“You are blind,” I say, reaching out to take one of his hands.

The silence hangs over our heads like a siege. I keep my eyes trained on his face, watching the emotions flicker across it, how he battles with himself to keep hold of an evasive calm. I run my thumb across the backs of his knuckles, over and over again, hoping that he can derive some comfort from it, waiting for the unavoidable flood of questions.

When he manages to speak, his voice is barely louder than a whisper. “How?”

“I only found out you were blind ten minutes ago,” I say gently. “But my best guess from your injuries is that it’s cortical blindness caused by blunt force trauma to the head.”

“Will I...”

“See again? I can’t say.”

“ _Fuck,”_ he says. Then louder, “ _Fuck._ ”

“I’m so sorry.” I grip his hands tighter, watching him shatter into knife-sharp shards. What else can I do?

*

_Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, Poe lies and watches the drip of the moonlight onto Finn’s face, traces the eyebrows and the mountain ridge of his nose and the sweeping curve of his jaw. It’s the oldest cliché in the book but when Finn’s asleep, soft and vulnerable and dreaming, it looks as though the weight of the sky has been lifted off his shoulders and Poe can almost forget that until two years ago, Finn was mindless FN-2187 who had never heard music or tasted chocolate or fallen in love._

_He could burn planets for what was done to this man, what has been done to billions of children all over the galaxy; he wants to rip away tectonic plates and boil oceans and scourge the First Order from the stars but wars like this move in inches and he has to be content with what he can get._

_Sometimes though, he thinks, watching Finn sleep, these moments of peace are worth everything._

*

. **To be continued.**

 


	2. An Albratross Around Your Neck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Bastille. Thank you so much for the kudos and comments - I really love hearing what you think! Also the sweary-droid idea is very inspired by the incredible peradi's work (at which I laughed until I cried, I can't recommend their stories enough, especially [finn should really learn to speak droid](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5733835) ).

**How did you survive the war?**

**I gave up. What else could I do?**

*

I don’t know how long we stay there, Mr Mystery gripping my hands and swearing in a torrent of black and blue and white frothing water, but eventually I hear the creak of the rickety steps and my daughters appear in the doorway, gold-stained from the lamplight, Anja half-hiding behind Queenie.

“Girls,” I say exasperatedly, but there’s no real heat behind my words. Mr Mystery holds himself very still, frozen like a wild animal in a starship’s searchlight. “It’s only my daughters,” I tell him, and he calms, subsiding back against the pillows.

“Can we say hello, Momma?” Queenie is leaning forward on the tips of her toes, a bird about to take flight.

“Is that alright?” I ask Mr Mystery. He doesn’t seem to register that I am speaking to him for a few moments, and then he nods slowly. “Come on then. Be careful, alright, he can’t see you.”

Queenie moves forward slowly, porcelain and quiet and warmth, reaching out to touch Mr Mystery’s hand. Anja detaches herself from Queenie and limpets onto my leg, hiding her face in my trousers and then slowly peeking out through her supernova of dark curls.

“Hi, I’m Queenie. What’s your name?”

“Hello Queenie,” Mr Mystery rasps. “My name’s Poe. Poe Dameron.”

*

There is only one explanation for this: he’s in a dream. This is the only thing his brain can come up with to account for the voices and the endless, sparkling white. He’s in a nightmare – the worst nightmare he could ever have – and in a moment he’s going to wake up back on D’Qar with the sister moons silhouetting Finn’s sleeping face and the sticky hum of the power generators outside the window.

The girl, Queenie, has been sitting with him for a while now, still holding his hand. He forces himself to focus on her words, to breathe through the chaotic hysteria crashing about in his ribcage.

“You’re ours now and we’ll look after you, even if Momma gripes,” Queenie says and he chokes back a retort that he’s _not_ theirs, he’s _never_ theirs, he belongs to a man with a heart big enough to hold a sun and a girl with electricity arcing through her bones, he belongs to the space and the stars and the Resistance, but how can he now? How will he ever fly again?

“That’s kind.” His voice is strained, but he doesn’t think she notices; not that he could tell.

“Most people we find in the backyard are dead,” she confides. He hears a whisper – hair against clothing, maybe, or the rustle of clothes against blankets.

“Did you…” he forces himself to choke out the words, feeling the leaden weight of them against his lips, “did you find anyone else with me?”

“No.” Then, “Are you okay?”

Finn. Rey. _Finn._ He smells burning and remembers the way their faces looked, grey with cinders and fear and resolve as the Stormtroopers pounded up the stairs. Finn’s fingers curling around his. The suddenness of the silence, the splinter of the door and the angry buzz of Rey’s lightsabre.

“I don’t know where my friends are,” he manages, and it’s only belatedly that he realises he’s crying, the sobs heaving out of his throat. There’s a rustle, and then a warm weight against his shoulder. “I think…they might be dead.”

What he doesn’t say: I wish I were dead too.

(He knows he isn’t dreaming).

*

When I come up the stairs with a little broth for Poe, I find my daughter tucked up against his side. There are constellations of tear-stains on his face, and Queenie has her hand woven through his, her words a steady rhythm in time with the spatter of the rain outside. I stand in the doorway, the tray cutting sharp lines into my hands, and listen for a moment.

“And then the boy killed the witches, and freed the star and the princess, and they all lived happily ever after.”

“Just in time for something to eat,” I say, walking into the room with a deliberately heavy step. “Queenie, your dinner is getting cold downstairs.”

“Yes, Momma.” She untangles herself and smiles at Poe even though she knows he can’t see it. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” he murmurs. “And thank you for the story.”

I run my hand over the top of her head as she passes, then go to set the tray down. “I’ve got to change your bandages, and then there’s some dinner if you’re hungry.”

“Not really.”

“You need to try and get something down. You’ll thank me later.” Then, out of curiosity as I touch his shoulder to let him know where I am, “What story was Queenie telling you?”

He shrugs dully, his face set in a lifeless mask. “Something about a fallen star and witches who wanted to eat her heart.”

I smile to myself. “Oh that one. I don’t know why she likes it so much, it’s grim.”

He doesn’t reply. I wonder, if I were to look hard enough, if I could see the depression slipping under his skin like blood-poisoning, skimming through his veins to his heart.

“How are your wounds feeling?”

“Sore.”

“I can imagine. They’re healing well, though – should only be a week or so before you can leave bed.”

“Fine.” He turns his head away to the wall, completely uninterested. “I think I want to sleep now.”

“Okay,” I say. “Shout if you need anything.”

His silence rings in my ears. I leave him to it.

*

**How did you survive the war?**

**Sometimes you have to cling onto thin air and pretend you’re not drowning.**

*****

“Momma, he thinks his friends are dead,” Queenie says to me after her bedtime story. Anja is already flat-out, sprawled across the pillow like a puppet with her strings cut, but Queenie is sitting on the edge of the bed, a little ghost in her scabby white nightdress. I can almost see the light shining through her edges and curse the lack of proper food, the lack of anything around here.

Fucking First Order and their blockades. Why couldn’t they have stayed on their own side of the galaxy?

“What friends?”

“The friends he came here with. He says he thinks that they’re dead, and that’s why he’s sad. I told him the story to make him happier.”

“That was nice of you – not the happiest story, though.”

“It ends happily.” Queenie sticks her bottom lip out at me, and I laugh, feeling a rare rush of happiness flood through my veins. “And he’s a grown-up – he doesn’t get scared like Anja does.”

“Yes, that wasn’t very sensible,” I say, remembering Anja’s wails after a nightmare about the witches finding her and cutting out her heart. She’d been inconsolable, climbing into my bed and clinging to me for a good hour just in case the witches were going to materialise out of the inky nooks of the room. “Goodnight, darling.”

“Night, Momma.”

When I blow out the lamp, I wonder.

*

_After the attack on Starkiller Base, time dribbles away in fits and starts. He spends most of it at Finn’s bedside or elbows deep in the engine of his X-Wing with BB-8 chittering out a cheerful string of swear-words near his feet. Sometimes there are gushing spurts of activity – fights over the holo-board in the planning room, a ship spotted in a system a little too close – but they die down quickly enough and it’s back to sitting with Finn and pretending he’s not staring at the rise and fall of his chest, counting breaths to make sure he’s still alive. The what-ifs are a writhing, seething rathtar in his stomach._

_Finn wakes two weeks later._

_There’s no song and dance, no fuss, one minute he’s shifting restlessly in sleep, and the next his eyes are open and he says, “Poe?”_

_BB-8 takes a picture of Poe’s face in a wheeze of light. When he looks back at it later, it says everything; his expression is soft, hazy at the edges like clouds fringing the sun._

_[you moist mushy fuck] BB-8 will beep when it shows Poe that evening. [why don’t you fucking tell him already, you cunt?]_

_But this is now, not later. Poe tightens his fingers around Finn’s and doesn’t think he’s ever going to stop smiling. “Hey buddy. It’s good to see your eyes.”_

_*_

Here is a true thing: Queenie is the one who brings Poe Dameron back to life.

Sure I helped with the practicalities, but that’s more because I’m a nurse and a grown woman and a mother rather than a girl made up of mostly heart and not enough good sense. It’s hard to care for someone when you’ve got resentment simmering in your blood and cooking you from the inside; how I _wish_ he’d already been dead when Queenie and Anja found him. Having a man in the house – even a sick, blind, mostly-silent one who never leaves his bed – is bringing back the old nightmares, the bile searing my throat whenever I stop for long enough to think.

It’s completely irrational. I only speak to him to pass the time of day. Often enough, he never says anything back. Perhaps he can feel that I don’t want him here, I don’t know.

But Queenie, oh I think Queenie is half in love with him, as much as a twelve-year-old can be half in love with a grown man. She spends all day up there in his room, doing the work I set her and telling him stories and chattering and singing in her little sparrow’s voice. Even Anja is getting less scared and she sometimes climbs onto the end of his bed and sits on his feet, listening to her older sister, pretending to be the princess to Queenie’s prince, and warbling off-key in a way that makes my heart ache as I sit at the ancient table and write out a message in the old cipher that I’ve drilled into my brain.

Isn’t it strange how some things you never forget how to remember?

“Where are you going, Momma?” Queenie has appeared at the top of the stairs.

“I’m going to get our rations,” I say, shrugging on my old coat, tying the black scarf about my blonde hair and slipping the message into the split seam between the layers of fraying material.

“Okay,” Queenie plops herself down on the top step, resting her chin on her hands and regarding me steadily. “Momma?”

“Yes?”

She’s chewing on her lip in a way that tells me she’s nervous about something. “Would you mind possibly…?”

“Spit it out, Queenie.”

“Well, Poe is nearly better and I was thinking about Old Mister Stepanek, you know, who was blind and he had that stick to help him not bump into things and I thought…”

“Queenie, sticks like that are special from the New Republic. We’d never be able to get hold of one.”

“It doesn’t have to be a _special_ stick.” My daughter folds her arms, and I sigh, feeling the pinch of a migraine at my temples. This trip out is already going to be too long – the dead drops are nearly on the other side of the city.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I say tersely. “No promises.”

“Thank you Momma!”

“You’re welcome.” I go to the grimy window, pulling aside one edge of the curtain to look up and down the street. A shaft of sunlight sets the dust moats spinning like tiny moons around the room. “You know the drill, Queenie. No-one comes in, no-one goes out. If you see Stormtroopers…”

“Go to the shelter at the back of the garden and don’t come out until you come to find us,” Queenie recites in a sing-song voice. “Yes, I know Momma.”

“Good girl. I’ll see you this evening.”

She looks at me with her ocean-eyes and nods, chewing on her lip again. “Be careful.”

“Don’t worry, darling,” I say, heaving the door open and stepping out into the light.

*

**How did you survive the war?**

**I followed a light.**

**There is no light. I think you’re dreaming.**

**Darling, sometimes dreams are the only things that see you through.**

*

_“I’m not leaving you.”_

_“Yes, you are.” Rey’s face is set in stubborn lines. She folds her arms and tries to look unmoving; Poe imagines he can see the Force crackling around her in a halo of sparks. Finn slides his hand into Poe’s._

_“You’re our escape route,” he says gently. “And that’s too important to be jeopardised.”_

_The part of Poe that’s Commander Dameron of the Resistance knows that is sensible, but when it’s one of his best friends and the love of his goddamn life heading off into danger and leaving him to sit in a backstreet spaceport somewhere, sensible is the last thing he wants to be. “I know,” he says mutinously. “But I still think it’s important we stick together. BB-8 can have the engines running ready to go whenever we need to.”_

_[don’t you dare abandon me again you fucking bastard] BB-8 beeps. Poe runs his free hand over its dome, feeling as though he’s being slowly tugged apart into little pieces, but knowing sense is going to win out. It will kill him, sitting here under the cloud-laden, groaning sky surrounded on all sides by Stormtrooper-infested streets, not knowing when or if they’re going to come back. Finn is giving him this horribly understanding look, and Poe closes his eyes, tips his head against the strut of the ship they liberated from Yavin Four. He leaves Finn behind all the time, soaring off in Black One to the furthest corners of the galaxy, but those are rarely suicide missions going after certified maniacs._

_“You will check in whenever it is safe to do so,” he says tightly. “And the second you do it, get right back here, understand?”_

_“Of course,” Rey is exuding Jedi-calm, her hand on the safely-disguised shape of her lightsabre on her hip. Finn leans forward to kiss him, a brief, dry brush of lips and a scared shit-less smile._

_“To a world without Kylo Ren,” he says, and that’s when the ground explodes._

_*_

They keep me waiting for a whole standard week, and I’m a live wire, snapping at anything or anyone that catches me unawares. Anja sits quietly, watching me pace and roughly chop the grey, unidentifiable meat that came from our market-issued ration pack with her stuffed nerf hugged carefully to her chest, and Queenie is upstairs with her _best friend in the whole world_ and his stick. Occasionally, I hear the clatter of it against the stair-rail as he makes his laborious way from one end of the small landing to the other.

I suppose it’s my own fault for never letting them leave the house that she’s latched onto him with so much enthusiasm.

It’s a mellow evening just before curfew when the knock finally comes. I usher Anja upstairs, nerf and letters and all and brush my hands on my skirt, feeling sweat trickle down my spine, pooling in the hollow of my back, staring at the door. The knock comes again, three distinct taps. My breathing is shallow and my hands tremble as though there’s a gale blowing through the room. The blaster is heavy, hooked onto the back of my belt.

I wanted this. I was the one to contact them. I can’t back out now.

I step forward and open the door.

*

_It’s a slow thing._

_That’s Poe’s only real thought on what life is like after Finn wakes up. It drives everyone else insane listening to him talk about Finn –_

_“Does Black One know she’s been replaced in your affections?” Jess ribs from her position on the wing of her own fighter._

_“Kriff, Jess, don’t you have anything better to do?”_

_“Don’t_ you _have anything better to do than mooning over our favourite defector?”_

_\- but for the moment, every-kriffing-one is just going to have to put up with it. Finn only fucking came out of the First Order three weeks ago, he’s still currently laid up in the medbay with a very large, if slowly healing, hole in him, and Poe is not about to land him with all this feelings crap when Finn doesn’t even know who he is as a person yet._

_BB-8 is the worst. It makes as close to kissy noises as its programming will allow it, and whines about how sick it is of watching Poe be so dumb and [why won’t you fucking get a move on, haven’t I told you he likes you you banthafucking cunt?]_

_A truth of life: things always happen when you are never expecting them._

_He and Finn are in the hangar, curled up next to each other in the cockpit of his X-wing with a blanket and a bottle of brandy he’s been saving for a special occasion. The doors are open a tiny sliver and beyond the night-lights of the taxi-way, the galaxy spirals off into the inky night, dripping starlight onto the asphalt. The alcohol is slick and giddy in his veins, burning the back of his throat, and they’re having one of the deep philosophical conversations that being awake at 3am after a party warrant, and just like that, Finn turns his head and presses his lips to Poe’s. It lasts half a second and then he’s pulling back, his expression set, worrying his bottom lip with his teeth._

_“I’m sorry, I…”_

_“Come here,” Poe says, and then they’re kissing properly, crunched into a strange position around the pilot’s seat and the controls. Poe’s head is full of Finn, and then next day, when they wake up sore and aching from spending the night twisted into an X-wing, he cannot think of a better way for it to have happened._

_*_

“Good evening, I’m here to fix your water supply.”

The person they’ve sent is blandly smiling young man in a trader’s overalls. He has an old, scratched leather briefcase and a little scar pulling down the corner of his mouth.

“You’re from the repair place?”

“Aida sent me herself.”

“Come right in,” I check up and down the street for the tell-tale white helmets before I shut and bolt the door. My hands are still shaking, and I unhook the blaster, ushering him further into the room.

“Branwen, right?” he says, dropping the case and sitting down in the chair I pull out for him.

“Yes.” Nausea is crawling up my throat. Why did I ever think I could let them back into my house, into my life? I know where this leads, I know it, history _always fucking repeats itself_ and now I’ve started the cycle I’m trapped until everything is over. I clench my hands under the table.

“Your note wasn’t the clearest, would you care to elaborate? You know the resistance here will help you in any way we can.”

“I have a man in my house, he’s an off-worlder and he’s lost his friends. They got past the blockades. If you find his friends, he might be able to get out. Take a message. I don’t know.”

“Where is this man?”

“Queenie?” I call up the stairs, trying to hide the tremor in my voice. “Can you bring Poe downstairs, please?”

“Yes Momma!” she trills, her face appearing over the rail. “It might take a little while, we haven’t tried stairs yet.”

“That’s okay, darling.”

The resistance man and I sit in silence as Queenie’s voice lilts something to Poe and he murmurs a response. Then a tap-tap-tapping and he’s making slow and careful progress down the stairs, gripping the rail with blood-drained fingers. Queenie is a lighthouse in front of him, guiding him with slow, calm words. They make it down with no accidents, and when Queenie steps aside, the resistance man jerks out of his chair.

“ _Kriffing hell,_ ” he says and then a tidal wave of blood drowns his cheeks. He coughs self-consciously. “I’m sorry, sir, it’s just I wasn’t expecting _you._ ”

“ _What_?” I look between them for a second, Poe standing straight with his stick in his hand, the the resistance man snapped straight to attention. Poe doesn’t look like he’s going to be giving me any answers any time soon, so the resistance man turns to me. Incredulity is painted across his face.

“Didn’t you recognise him?”

“Why would I recognise anyone I find half-dead in my back garden?”

“Mistress Branwen, this is only Commander Poe Dameron, the _best pilot_ in the whole bloody galaxy.”

That hits me like a blaster round to the chest, and I’m sure I must look like ridiculous for a moment, before I gather myself together, trying to ignore the flood of dread building in my chest. “Well, you’re welcome to him. The sooner he’s out of my damn house the better.”

“Momma!”

“I’m sorry Queenie,” I say, pushing past the resistance man. “It’s for the best.”

I’m barely out of the back door before I’m running.

**.To be Continued.**


	3. Volcanoes In The Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry this took so long - I've been in the production team of The Producers at university (it's hilarious, outrageous and brilliant, so if you don't already know it, I'd highly recommend) so have had no time whatsoever to write. Extra kudos to anyone who spots the Hamilton reference in this chapter :) Enjoy!

**How did you survive the war?**

**I’ll tell you a thing about remembering: it never lets you forget.**

**You’re talking nonsense.**

**I know. Wars are nonsense, aren’t they?**

*****

When I eventually gather the pieces of myself together again, the sky is darkening towards a glorious watercolour sunset and the wild things in the forest beyond the city have started their evening concert. Monsters, I think, as I push myself shakily to my feet, can be found everywhere. The grass is wet and slick as I make my way back through the garden, embarrassment crawling into my ribcage and clutching slimy fingers around my heart. I push open the door and stop dead.

“I thought I told you to _go._ ”

Poe looks up at the sound of my voice. “It isn’t safe for me to be outside.”

The anger is back, simmering under my skin. “I need you to leave.”

“Why?”

“I just _do,_ will you _please just…_ where are my girls?”

“Upstairs. Sit down, please. I need to talk to you.” His words, cut off and sharp, stop me in my tracks as I head for the bolt-hole of the stairs, every inch of him screaming commander, pilot, hero. “Branwen, this is _important._ ”

“Fine,” I say, hating the petulance that creeps into my words and pulling a chair out with a screech. “Talk.”

“I know you don’t want to get re-involved with the Resistance…”

“Who told you I was involved in the first place?”

“Sergeant Marquez implied.”

“Who?”

“The Resistance soldier who came today at your request.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have gotten into this again.”

“Branwen…”

“I retired for a _reason,_ and I’m _not going back_ do you hear me?”

Poe’s sightless eyes glint like oil slicks in the knife edge of the sunlight. “We need you. They have a plan. It’s all undercover, it wouldn’t be dangerous, no-one would know you were part of it…”

Edmond’s faces emerges from a cobwebbed corner of my mind, the way he’d touch my face before I left, forehead to forehead, nose to nose. The fog of our breath in the cold morning air, the way he’d hold my hands, his pulse beating out ‘be safe, be safe, be safe.’ “I’m not _interested._ I’ve lost enough to this _pointless_ fight.” I barely restrain the snarl building in my throat, rising from the chair.

“We all have ghosts,” he says softly. “You don’t think I’m the exact same as you, sitting here, wondering if the people I love are even still alive out there?”

“We are _not_ the same.”

“But sometimes,” he ploughs on, ignoring me as though I’m a spectre howling with the wind, “sometimes, you have to be selfless. You have to forget what has passed and look to the future. Don’t you want the galaxy to be safe for Queenie and Anja?”

“Queenie nearly fucking _died_!” The fury is a fever, madness scorching me from the inside out, blackening my synapses and my cells and my DNA, white-hot like a new-born star. “She was three years old and the regime soldiers we were fighting put a loaded blaster to her head, and every time I kicked one of them or bit one or even screamed they held her tighter and said that they’d do to her what they were doing to me if I didn’t co-operate so don’t you dare lecture me about making the galaxy safe for my children because it never fucking will be do you hear me?”

The silence thuds down like a meteor shower as I stand there in my kitchen with the memories rolling over and over before my eyes, my screams, the feel of their hands on me, _in_ me, the sight of Queenie crying with the gag in her mouth and the gun to her head, and Edmond, _Edmond_ , in a seeping puddle of blood, his limbs splayed against the flagstones.

Poe’s eyes are wide. My breaths are trembling in my throat, the aftermath of my anger like a blast-zone, rubble strewn around us.

“Branwen…” he says, eventually. “You’re wrong.”

I can only stare.

“What happened to you – the awfulness is beyond words – but it happens across the galaxy. Every day the pile of wrongs gets added to; my boyfriend, Finn,” Poe says his name like a prayer, “he was a Stormtrooper. FN-2187. He was taken from his family as a baby and turned into a killing machine, and still he’s the kindest, bravest person I’ve ever met.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“And one of my best friends – Rey – she was a Jedi apprentice, under Master Skywalker, and she had so much heart I was constantly amazed that it all fit in her chest. I’ll never be able to wind back the clock and save them from the First Order; the only thing I can do is keep fighting, keep trying to make the galaxy something they would have been proud of. Trying is all any of us can do. Evolutions happen in increments – we’re not going to wake up to a perfect world tomorrow. Maybe we’ll never get it right, but who knows? The future is what we make it.”

My throat is tight and itchy, and I feel the tears dribbling down my cheeks. He reaches out a hand in my general direction. I scrape the ash from the inside of my lungs and exhale, feeling his words resonate in the space where I imagine my soul might be.

This started years ago, when I was young and idealistic and on fire with hope. This started when I held my new-born daughter for the first time, marvelling at the tiny speck of humanity in my arms. This started when we took a dead man from our garden and nursed him back to life. No matter how much I try to deny it, rebellion, resistance, fighting for a future, will always be a part of me, no matter how scared I am, no matter how much I tell myself it’s not worth it. Even though every part of me is screaming, even though those ideals were lost to the passage of time, I can never say no.

A truth of human nature: there are moments when you’re into something so deep, the only thing you can do is keep swimming down.

A truth about me: I’ve been drowning since the very start.

I lean over and take Poe’s hand.

*

_Before the sound of explosion has even cleared from the air they’re scrambling to their feet and running headfirst into the dust-cloud, choking on smoke and debris. BB-8 weaves around Poe’s feet as he unhooks his blaster, firing at the hazy shapes that materialise out of nothing, his heart chaotic in his chest._

_“This way!” he hears Rey call, and suddenly they’re out into the blazing day. Rey swings at someone with her lightsabre; they’re gone before he even hits the ground, weaving into the backstreets. It feels like they’re dashing through an infinity of two story, brown-stained houses with limp, loose shutters and doors like eyes following their progress. Every breath is burning by the time they stop, and Poe doubles over, hacking the dust out of his lungs._

_“It’s okay,” Finn wheezes close to his ear, his arm around Poe’s waist. “It’s okay, Rey says we’ve lost them.”_

_“It was a trap,” Poe gets out. “They were expecting us.”_

_Rey makes a sound of acknowledgement. A blade of sun illuminates the topography of her face, the ancient eyes and the scar a white line cutting across her cheek. “He’s here,” she murmurs. “I can feel it, in the Force.”_

_“Where?”_

_“Follow me,” she says, every line of her luminous with light and resolve and power, and they do._

_*_

**How did you survive the war?**

**People got sick of all the fighting.**

**Really?**

**No. No – people will never get tired of fighting.**

*

_There’s not much Poe remembers about what follows. Fighting beside a girl with a heart big enough to hold the galaxy and a man with fear on his face and molten courage running through his veins. Ducking around corners. The room with the sloping ceiling and the soundtrack of the battle outside. The footsteps. The look on Finn’s face, the clutch of his fingers._

_The silence._

*

Aida has aged, I think, as she helps herself to a seat at my kitchen table. Armed rebellion has carved deep gullies across her face and her eyes are the exhausted ones of someone fighting against an avalanche. She studies me in silence for an unnervingly long time. I try not to fidget like a school-child, clasping my hands behind my back and meeting her stare for stare. In my peripheral vision, I can see Queenie and Anja, banished upstairs, curiosity pressing them against the stair-rail.

“You’re re-joining us, then?” Aida’s voice is neutral.

“Only until we have managed to get Commander Dameron off the planet and back to General Organa.”

“I can’t persuade you to take up a permanent position again?”

“You know I can’t risk it.”

She sighs. “We don’t have many medics left, Branwen. Even if you could just act as a safehouse…”

“Aida, I _can’t._ I have to think about my daughters first. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll make use of you whilst we’ve got you, then,” she says. “But that later. Do you know what we’re attempting to do?”

“We’re trying to repair a communications array in a First-Order controlled city without them noticing, and get a message out to the Resistance,” I say dryly. “Good luck.”

“Luck has been on our side lately.” She runs a hand across her face. “It’s very nearly ready to be assembled.”

“How nearly?”

“Three standards.”

“Kriffing hell.”

“We were already trying to contact them,” she admits. “It’s been in progress for a while.”

“I’m going to need to go over some things if you want me combat-ready.”

“You have the three standards. Commander Dameron will need to write and encrypt his message in that time; I trust you’ll help with that.” She pauses. “Is he around?”

“Upstairs. You can go and see him, if you want, but remember to make some noise so he knows you’re there.”

“Will his eyesight come back?”

I shrug, aiming for careless and missing by a mile. “No idea. Even if it was my area of expertise, we don’t have the equipment here for me to tell.”

“Maybe the Resistance will be able to help him.”

“Maybe. Wouldn’t want the best pilot in the galaxy to be without his eyes permanently.”

“Branwen.” She comes around the table, putting a firm hand on my shoulder and forcing me to meet her eyes. “This isn’t like you.”

“You haven’t seen me in nine years. People change.”

“I told you I was sorry...”

“Sometimes sorry isn’t good enough.” I jerk away, rubbing the material of my shirt as though I can erase the feeling of her fingerprints from it. “Go and see Commander Dameron then get out of my house.”

“Fine.”

I don’t turn until I hear her footsteps receding up the stairs, her soft hello to my daughters, the angry squeal of hinges, breathing out smoke from the fire smouldering away inside me. I pull calm over my face like a veil and turn to Queenie wrapping her arms around my waist and burying her face in my stomach.

“Hey.” I touch the top of her head gently. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she says, re-emerging and blinking up at me. Her blue eyes are a whirlpool, pulling me under, making my breath catch in my throat. “I just wanted to give you a hug.”

“Thank you, darling.” My chest feels too small, too close for the emotion swelling in-between the fingers of my ribs. “I have to do some reading now – do you and Anja want to sit with me?”

“I’ll go and get her,” Queenie says. At the bottom of the stairs, she looks back over her shoulder. “Momma, is everything going to be okay?”

One of the many things you learn as a mother: lies are powerful. Use them well.

I make myself smile. “Yes of course. Everything is going to be just fine.”

*

_Memory is a funny thing: it comes in fits and starts and floods, often when you don’t want it to at all._

_Poe remembers pain. He remembers lying in the street, breathing in dust and agony and jeering shouts, the crackle of something searing the skin of his back. He thinks he was screaming. He hears Finn shout his name, over and over, his anguish getting more distant; Poe doesn’t know whether it’s because the world is receding or if Finn’s getting dragged away._

_It’s not long after that the blackness swoops down and he knows no more._

*

The time slides away through my fingers, and before I even know it, I’m rolling out of my bed to a watercolour dawn trickling over the treetops, pulling on the clothes that have been buried at the bottom of my trunk for years. I shake the memories out of the old, black headscarf, pinning it over the coil of my braid, and pick up the fraying armband with the red cross on it, looking at it for several slow, drooping moments.

“This is it,” I say to myself, sliding it onto my left arm. I never thought I’d do this again, be getting ready for a mission, early in the day before my shift at the hospital, knots in my insides and jitters in my hands as Edmond turned over in bed, watching me through the cracks of his eyelids with baby Queenie tucked close to his chest. I could almost be that girl again, that girl with a husband and a little baby and ideals burning brightly under her skin, lighting her up and sending her out to fight for a better galaxy, except Edmond isn’t in my bed, Queenie is nearly teenage and there’s a lump of dread congealing inside me.

People are made up of multiples that flake away as the years trudge on. That’s a truth no-one can deny. The girl I was is nothing but dead cells, drifting on the wind; she’s never going to come back. What’s done is done.

I pick up my bag and sling it over my shoulders, heading down the stairs and into the light.

**.To Be Concluded.**


End file.
